Our Jerusalem
An Outreach Campaign
Ronald W. Waters
Our Jerusalem is a six-eight week campaign to
reach out to unchurched friends, relatives, associates,
and neighbors of
people from a congregation. The name derives from Jesus' Great Commission
as recorded in Acts 1:8:
But you will receive power when
the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem,
and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
The idea was borrowed from a campaign conducted by
Park Street Brethren Church
in Ashland, Ohio, and adapted for use by Mt. Olive Brethren Church,
McGaheysville, Virginia. At the time we did Our Jerusalem at Mt. Olive in the
fall of 1987, the church was averaging just under 100 in worship.
Phase 1—the mailing campaign
First, we planned a six-week direct mail campaign to unchurched
families in our community. We set a goal of mailing to fifty families,
feeling that was a reasonable number for us to be able to effectively follow up
with personal visits. Each mailing included a
cover letter (the first one by the pastor, and subsequent letters
written by members of the congregation) and a colorful brochure. We used
brochures from ACTS International because
they were attractive and because they presented a low-key, non-threatening
presentation of how the Christian faith relates to daily living. Brochures
were imprinted on the back with information about the services of the church,
address, phone number, and office hours.
Mailings 1 to 4 focused on common life needs—reaching to our
full potential as human beings, overcoming worry, marital love, and forgiving
others. Mailing 5 was more overt, including a brochure which presented the
plan of salvation. Mailing 6 keyed in on the value of being part of a
local church.
We had planned to select names and addresses of functionally
unchurched families in the community (people who had not attended church except
for holidays or weddings or funerals during the prior year). We had this
information during a community census we had conducted with six other area
churches the prior spring. However, to involve our congregation, we
include a "My Circle of Contacts" insert
in our worship folder before beginning the campaign, asking for names and
addresses of "FRANs": friends, relatives, associates, and neighbors who are
unchurched. (We actually inserted two copies of the handout: one for them to
turn in with names and addresses and the other to keep as a prayer reminder.)
We received enough names from the congregation without using any from the
community census!
Volunteers hand-addressed the envelopes. Because of the
quantity, we mailed first-class. The first and last mailings were in
envelopes with the church's return address; the in-between envelopes hand no
return address to identify them with the church (so they might be opened out of
curiosity rather than immediately thrown away as "junk mail").
The cover letters written by
members of the congregation were outstanding. Most were written by
individuals who were relatively new to our church. We asked each letter
writer to write on the subject of the brochure but not to repeat its contents.
We also encouraged them to mention the name of the church at some point in the
letter and to either tell an incident that related to the subject of the mailing
or to tell what this church had meant to them. Some of the letters were
printed on church letterhead and others were just copied on plain white paper.
(The effect would be improved if a writer had personal or business stationery
they would be willing to use.) We asked each writer to sign each letter to
give it a more personal feel.
Mailing 3 also included a letter inviting the recipient to join
a Welcome Class, a nine-week class that
introduced class members to the church and included one session on who to become
a follower of Jesus as saving Lord. Ideally, this would be better included
in mailing 6 or as a follow-up mailing. However, scheduling required us to
conduct the class earlier.
Mailing 6 also included a stamped and addressed postcard
containing a response form regarding the mailings.
During the six week period of the mailings, I geared my
Sunday morning messages to the subject of outreach.
As a visual aid, I mounted a large map of our community on an easel in the front
of the worship center. On the map I inserted colored pins for the homes of
our members and regular attendees. I used different colored pins for the
households we were mailing to. This made it very easy to see how
thoroughly we were reaching "our Jerusalem."
Our annual revival services came during the fourth week of the
campaign. We asked our speaker to give emphasis to outreach and church
growth. The last evening of the meetings, we conducted a seminar on "How
to Reach Out to People."
Phase 2—the follow-up campaign
As part of this presentation, we discussed the second phase of
the campaign—a three-week visitation program to the families receiving the
mailings. The purpose of the visitation was to make a "get-acquainted"
call to establish a personal contact with the unchurched families and offer them
an invitation to attend our church. Fourteen members of the church
volunteered to help with the visitation, and most of them made at least one
visit.
We conducted organized visitation on Thursday nigh of mailing
weeks 5 and 6. Two people could not go out in the evenings, so they made
daytime visits. Prior to the visitation nights, I called people who had
been receiving the mailings to make appointments for someone from the church to
make a "get-acquainted" visit. This was effective as a sorting
technique—we knew that families who would be willing to schedule an appointment
would be more receptive to those visiting. In making the calls, I discovered
several families who were already attending another church and a few were simply
"not interested." For several, Thursday nights were not a convenient time
for us to visit.
The result was that our visiting couples had very positive
experiences in visiting these families. I provided them with a form to
record information learned during the visit (preferably to be written down after
the visit had concluded, but I'm sure some used it as an outline for their
conversation).
We did not schedule a third week of visitation because we were
having difficulty making appointments. Some visiting teams agreed to take
names and make appointments on their own at other times, but this did not seem
to result in many visits being completed. Also, the first night I had made
one less appointment than we had pairs to visit. So one man and I tried some
"cold call" visits without appointments. This, likewise, did not prove to
be effective.
After the three weeks set aside for visitation, we still had a
number of families who seemed to be receptive to a visit but with whom we were
unable to make an appointment. I had asked our people to commit to no more
than three nights of visitation, and I felt I must honor that commitment rather
than take advantage of them. Unfortunately, as a result, we did not follow
up the mailings as thoroughly as I had hoped.
Results
We began mailing to 52 families. After the third week, one
recipient called and asked to be removed from the mailing list. A total of
51 households received all the mailings. Of the 51, seven families visited
our church at least once during the 3 1/2 months after the campaign. Of
these seven, three families continued to attend and two of the three
participated in the Welcome Class and were received into membership in the
church. Also, one additional family that did not receive the mailings
attended twice with a family that was on the mailing list. I had been
praying for five new families from the campaign and was very pleased with the
results.
Over the next couple of years (extending beyond my service as
pastor to the church), several other families included in the mailing attended
the church, with some later joining the congregation. The church continued
to grow beyond my tenure as pastor under the capable and effective leadership of
my successor who also shared a strong commitment to outreach and congregational
growth.
Though I had envisioned doing the campaign several times more, I
left the church for a denominational position before we were able to do so.
There was a very important and unexpected benefit. Many in
the congregation were uneasy about giving the names of people they
knew—essentially, I think they were afraid they might be embarrassed if their
friends discovered that they had "turned them in"! I assured everyone that
we would not identify how we had compiled the names, so we would never reveal to
their names to the ones we were mailing to. I did, however, encourage them
to be praying for their friends and looking for opportunities to talk with them
about their faith and about the church.
As we approached the second phase, several approached me to say,
"I told [so-and-so] they could be expecting a call for someone from the church
to visit them." This told me they had begun to reveal themselves to their
friends as being part of our church and the mailings they were receiving.
Suggestions
This was not the first outreach effort of the church since I had
become pastor. I had spent two years preparing the
congregation—intentionally helping them to gain an outreach focus, to be
welcoming to new people, and to gain God's eyes and heart for people who are
lost. This campaign did much to move us forward in that process.
We also had been engaged for about a year in a joint venture
with three other congregations in sending the newspaper
Together to people
in the community. This had helped to raise awareness of the church in the
community and create a favorable impression on our neighbors. However, not
everyone in the Our Jerusalem mailings was in the mailing area for Together.
One change I would suggest is to space the mailings out a little
more—maybe once every week and a half or every two weeks instead of every week.
An alternative to a fix-length campaign would be to engage in a
constant mailing program, perhaps starting with five or ten households, then
start mailing to another five or ten households every two or three weeks
thereafter. This would make the follow-up visitation easier, assuming you
would have a core group of people willing to be involved on an ongoing basis.
Since we did not have an ongoing visitation team and had people committed for a
fixed three-week period, we needed to do all the mailing at once.
Overall, I believe it was a worthwhile effort and recommend it
to other congregations. Be sure to adapt the idea to your own context and
your congregation's needs and abilities.
________________
Resources
Encounter Brochures and Cover
Letters
The colorful
Encounter Brochures used in the original mailings were produced by
ACTS International.
Click here for a list of the brochures
available. Following are the titles of the brochures we used,
along with a copy of the cover letter sent with the brochure:
